Throughout Northern Ireland house prices have risen since the market reopened after the first lockdown in June 2020The 26-year-old from Derry was able to start saving during the Covid-19 pandemic. “I’d just got a continuing contract at work so during those two years I was on the best wage I’d ever been on, and not going to the bar, not socialising, not going on holiday and living at home meant I was able to put the majority of my wages away.
Jamie Taylor: 'Every conversation that I had with an estate agent seemed to be that prices were crazy and houses were going like hot cakes' House prices in the Derry City and Strabane District Council area are the cheapest in the North; according to the latest figures from Ulster University’s Northern Ireland Quarterly House Price Index, for April to June 2022, the average cost of a house in that area is £147,261 — though this is still more than £20,000 higher than the average cost just before the North entered Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020.
“It was very difficult to price, the market was just finding its own way, because if you put a house on [for sale], especially those houses at £140,000, £150,000, they just zoomed up — maybe another 20 grand, which you hadn’t had for a long time.” Originally from Co Derry, Carmel McCafferty and her husband have just relocated to Derry city after 27 years in Bray, Co Wicklow. “We sold it within a week, we had major demand for it… we had about 30 people, we did our viewings over two afternoons and we literally almost needed traffic lights at the front door, we ended up I was upstairs and my husband was downstairs.”
“So then of course you have bidding wars… about three, four, five years ago you would have got a very good house in Derry, and in the right area, for 250. Now we found that 250 was, you were talking 300, 350.” “I don’t know what the fix is, or if there is a fix for that, because there’s very little social housing or affordable housing being built in those locations, and it’s so competitive that you’ve got builders going in and buying two or three terraced houses, knocking them down and putting in an apartment block.
In Belfast — where the average price of a house rose by 8.1 per cent in the last quarter to £191,040 — first-time buyers are finding themselves priced out of certain areas. “There was a house in Andersonstown [in west Belfast] and the house was on for 139 and we thought it was perfect, obviously it needed work done, but in the end we were outbid by a landlord who had a substantial cash deposit, the house in the end was sold for close to 170,000.
Property Property Latest News, Property Property Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Housing investment strong despite challenges - surveyForeign capital represented nearly two-thirds of the money spent on housing projects in the first half of the year, according to real estate agents Cushman & Wakefield.
Source: RTEbusiness - 🏆 16. / 61 Read more »